State of Local

If there was ever a doubt in your mind about the folks at Ask.com and their desire to become the search engine of choice, they just got better. On Monday Ask.com added a very cool new element to its site: AskEraser.

AskEraser enables you to have greater control over your search data. More specifically, AskEraser allows you to keep your search activity from being tracked — and with a simple click — it erases Ask.com cookies and stops recording your search history.

In this day and age where online privacy is so vitally important, this is a pretty neat little application for Ask.com’s battle with its better-know brethren, Google and Yahoo. Despite the fact that today’s web is increasingly more personalized, this is still a smart move. With the brouhaha surrounding the Facebook Beacon debacle, and subsequent Clinton-like public apology by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, this looks like a move made specifically with the user experience as the driving force. Ask.com is in effect saying, “you’ve asked for it, and we’ve delivered.”

From a monetization standpoint, Ask.com is clearly leaving the potential for targeted advertising dollars on the table and instead looks like the uber responsible party, concerned about its users. And that’s pretty refreshing.
It will be interesting to see how or if some of the other search engines respond, or if some of the social networks try to do likewise.

SearchEngineLand.com posted today that Google News has updated its algorithm.

The two key enhancements:
1) Updates to its “news cluster” when a source adds updated or new information to a breaking story. The site doesn’t simply show the most recent publisher to post a story, but rather rewards the sources that first broke the story. Implications: more exposure for sites that stay with story; opportunity for editors to abuse this by making frequent, meaningless updates.

2) A “signal” that gives weight to a quality publisher who is geographically close the story. While a marquee news brand might dominate coverage of a big story, Google News isn’t forgetting about the little guys with deep roots at the center of the action. Implications: worthy rewards for original reporting with local context.

Google News, in a recent blog post recognizing the struggle to balance quantity and quality, asserts it’s not “just about including every story; it’s about helping you find the stories that matter most to you.” (Hear that, Topix?) Rewarding quality local publishers and the consumer all in one fell algorithmic swoop? One more reason to put stock in news aggregators.

The mall shootings in Omaha and the availability of security photos and 911 tapes forced a lot of consideration in newsrooms about how graphic to be and what kind of warnings to issue to viewers and online readers. At almost the same time as the shootings, a thousand miles away, a smaller but also horrific incident took place and forced a similar weighing of high interest against community standards.

KPHO in Phoenix was providing live coverage of police chasing a bank robber at up to 100 mph when the robber crossed the center line of a four-lane road and crashed head-on into another vehicle. Both drivers were killed in what anyone seeing it would describe as a spectacular and jaw-dropping collision. Some would say that’s what the helicopter chase business is all about.

But cameras immediately pulled away and the station did not show the crash again on TV. Viewers instead saw tape of the chase leading up to a split second before the crash, including smoking brakes on the innocent car. Meanwhile, the KPHO website posted the full tape and kept it up for a couple of hours before news director Tom Bell pulled it down, going instead with the chase leading up to the impact but not showing the collision.

Bell’s initial call is tough to argue with. TV is different from the web, he pointed out in an email exchange with me. It’s on in the living room with grandma, kids and everyone else watching with little expectation of extremely shocking content coming over the air.  Read More… »

About 12 or 13 years ago, I was told by my newspaper editor that I was now the liaison to this thing called a website. The task was to convince newspaper reporters and editors that online was going to be important and they needed to file news for it.

Fine, they said, but we don’t want to scoop ourselves online, right? The answer then was pretty much: Right. The print version of the paper was the 800-pound gorilla, the dog that wagged the online tail. What was good for print was what reporters and editors did first.

But the gorilla has slimmed down over the years; many newspapers have been getting the news first online for some time now. Many an editor now says flatly to his or her reporters: “Your job is to think online first, print second.” And it took top editors saying that, not the newsroom liaison, to make a difference.

In a half year dealing with the news operations of TV stations, I’m still waiting to hear that edict again. Why are TV news operations, with their penchant for breaking news and scoops, so slow to figure this out? On a big breaking story, why are reporters not pressed into helping the online folks? I understand the simultaneous demand to be live on the air, but that’s not an 800-pound gorilla either, is it? My most pressing question: Can anyone give me the name and station of a news director who has said, “Online first, on air second”?

The Financial Times has a great profile of French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur in today’s edition (free registration required to read it).

Le Meur has a lot of experience with successful startups, and his current project is Seesmic, a site which he is promoting via a series of daily, often odd YouTube clips.

In the FT piece, he offers up 10 rules for anyone wanting to be successful in business, and I include them here because I think many of them apply to local online news and advertising.

1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible.
2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
6. Be the first to recognize a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

Before I wade into this, let me throw out a couple of caveats.

Yes, I do work for Internet Broadcasting, but I’m not in sales. I don’t have any direct contact with client sales departments, and in fact, most of my experience here (and at my previous jobs), is on the journalism side.

But I do have experience working at news startups, and also run a small news site of my own in what passes for my free time. I know first hand what it’s like to be a scrappy web dog, wrangling for traffic and ad numbers and attention.

So take what I say not as some IB pontification, but as a guy who knows what it’s like to have few resources, little time and lots of financial pressures.

Everyone wants some magic bullet for online ad revenue. You’ll hear a lot of talk about how to sell your inventory, ways to package it and aggregate your traffic for national advertisers. All of these are legitimate and worthwhile discussions.

But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that at the end of the day, what’s actually on your site will drive your ad sales. Great content opens up sales opportunities and insures that you’ll not only make that initial sale, but end up with a happy advertiser who will return for another round. Read More… »